


Wasteland AU

by Butsinceimetyou



Series: Seblaine Week 2014 [4]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 03:31:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2372933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butsinceimetyou/pseuds/Butsinceimetyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for day 4 of Seblaine Week  2014 (Free Day)<br/>Summary: AU based on the book Wasteland by Francesca Lia Block.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wasteland AU

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: For those that have read the book, Blaine is Marina, Sebastian is Lex, and Nick is West.

Mom said, “Sebastian, you look so nice today, honey,” smoothing your hair, pushing it out of your eyes, and you said, “Blaine picked this lame shirt out,” and you winked at me. She said, “we’ve got to do something about all this hair, though,” or she said, “how was school today, Sebastian” and you said, “it sucked. Blaine, did your day suck as much as mine?” Once, in front of you, she told me I had reached that age when I wasn’t a sweet smelling little boy anymore and we needed to get me some deodorant. Later, you said, “she’s just jealous.” I asked what you meant but you wouldn’t answer.

—-

                Before you could drive and got the wagon, we took the bus to the beach. It picked us up on Ventura Boulevard and went over Sepulveda, through Westwood and all the way to Santa Monica. We knew the water wasn’t too clean there; there were reports that people got sick from swimming in the bay, but we didn’t care. We kicked off our flip-flops, ran across the sand that burned our soles, and fell onto our beach towels. You read Kerouac and I brought _Vogue._ I lay in a daze, blinking at the twinkle of white light on the blue waves, feeling that beautiful heat deep in my hair, salt water evaporating from my skin, leaving it smoother against my bones. The sand scratched under my swim trunks and I’d peek to see the contrast between the pale skin there and the rosebrown color of my belly, almost black where the hipbones poked up. We’d swim; we’d plunge into the salty stingy lunge of waves. We’d come out and you’d toss your head and drip drops of your hair on me. We’d stop for rocky road ice cream in Westwood on the way home and I picked out the nuts and gave them to you, you plucked marshmallows for me. I’d sleep next to you on the bus. Once, my shoulder slipped onto your shoulder while I was half asleep. I waited. You didn’t try to wake me up.

—-

                You asked me if I believed in reincarnation. You doodled on a napkin, carnation carnivore carnal. I said I wasn’t sure. You said if you died you’d come back as an animal— a dog. You’d always wanted a dog, but Mom said we couldn’t have one in the house, it would ruin the carpeting and the furniture and she said she’d end up having to pick up its shits while we were out partying. The second part wouldn’t have been true—we would have been good dog parents, especially you. You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs. You said, that if you came back as a dog, you’d find me and I could be your owner. I thought that it was weird you were talking about that, but you liked to talk about death. You said our society needed to talk more about it and not be so uptight—death was just another phase and maybe a better one. The beginning of something, right? You wondered if we knew each other before. If you were my baby, if you were my father. We weren’t brothers, you said. We were something else.

                You asked me who I thought I was before. I said maybe I was a fish because I love water and you said, you thought a merman, maybe.

                “If you were a merman,” you said, “If you were a merman, I was the sea.”

—-

                If Mr. Montgomery wasn’t going out of town and hadn’t asked you to house-sit for him, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe. Wine and paintings and old books and a Spanish house with windows over a sunken garden. Maybe it would have happened anyway.

                Mr. Montgomery was the only teacher you got along with. He thought you had talent as a writer. I only know this because he told me. He stopped me in the hall and asked me into his classroom. He introduced himself formally, even though I knew who he was, of course, and he said you were in his class and he thought were going to be an important writer someday. He said he was telling me because he was afraid that you wouldn’t tell me what he said and he thought you should have all the support you could get at home. I said that I’d never read anything you’d written but that you were always reading like a demon. He liked the expression reading-demon. He asked if I wrote, too, and I said no. He asked if I kept a journal. I didn’t, then. I decided I might try. He said you’d written this great paper on this poem called “The Waste Land” and that I should ask you to see it. Maybe it would help me when I got into his class next year. He smiled like he was looking forward to that. I thanked him. I’d always kind of liked Mr. Montgomery from afar. He always seemed like one of the coolest teachers. People whispered that he was gay and that he hung out at a gay bar called Oil Can Harry’s but because he was so nice and good-looking and cool it never seemed to really hurt him which was a big deal at our school where the littlest thing like a wandering eye or flood pants or some zits made kids start persecuting you like crazy.

  
                I came home and asked you about your paper. I told you what Mr. Montgomery had said. You didn’t say anything but I could tell you were secretly pleased and flattered that he’d told me. You said the paper was just some bullshit but I made you show it to me. It was all about fragmentation in the modern world. Modern meaning not now but way back in the twenties when it was written. But you said it still applied. The loss of God. Postmodernism being just a further breakdown and kind of an empty term as of yet in your opinion. You quoted “I can connect / Nothing with Nothing.” You called me the hyacinth boy. You read some lines and I didn’t understand any of it. You sounded like the homeless man who wanders on Ventura Boulevard eating out of trash cans and mumbling to himself. But it was kind of beautiful, beautiful and strange. Like the homeless man with hyacinth blue eyes that shine out of his char-dark face. You said I was the hyacinth boy. “Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed. I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence, / Oed’ und leer das Meer.” Desolate and empty the sea, you said.

                I told mom I was staying at Wes’ but instead I went over to Mr. Montgomery’s house. He lived in the Hollywood Hills south and east of the Valley. It felt so different around there— bohemian, old, and rambling. I wondered what it would be like if we got a house there someday. An old Spanish house like Mr. Montgomery’s with a thick cool adobe wall covered with crispy bougainvillea flowers and a sunken garden with a stone fountain and broad tall windows. You opened the big wooden door and let me in. Inside there were polished wood floors and high beams and lots of ironwork, painted wooden furniture, framed silk kimonos, primitive stone statues. You handed me a huge goblet of wine. I asked if it was okay and you said there was so much wine he wouldn’t even notice. He said to make myself at home, you said. There wasn’t just a lot of wine, but a lot a lot of books. The walls were solid books. A lot of them were old ones with fragile leather covers and golden lettering. You opened one so that I could smell it. You said old books smelled cool. A pressed leaf fell out and you put it back in carefully. Some of the books were dedicated to Ned from Joel. You said Joel was Mr. Montgomery’s boyfriend and that he was way nice, too, and that you’d met him for a second when you came over to get the key. You said you thought it was weird that they trusted you enough to stay in their house but I said it must have been because what you wrote was so good. You said you wouldn’t have trusted you based on that.

                You had made a fire in the deep fireplace with the Spanish tiles all around it and we sat there and drank our wine and ate some cheese, crackers, pickles, and canned mandarin oranges you had found. We played Mr. Montgomery’s classical records which you said sounded cool in this environment. You read to me from some of the books. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. We looked at the paintings on the walls. They were by someone with the initials J.S. and we wondered if it was Mr. Montgomery’s boyfriend Joel. They were big oil paintings of figures dancing and twining around each other. The colors seemed to pulse. It was like a single person with lots of limbs, a male and female all in one like Tiresias who is in that “Waste Land” poem. You found a James Brown record and played that. We took off our shoes and skidded around on the polished floors. We got drunk and poked around the house and went into the walk-in closet and tried on some of Mr. Montgomery and Joel’s jackets. I used some of their cologne. Then I wanted to take a bath so I ran water into the big sunken tub and poured in some bath salts and lit the candles in the square glass holders around the rim of the tub. There were big windows overlooking the garden. I opened them and smelled the jasmine and the wet earth. There was a little warm breeze and the garden tinkled and chimed like stars falling. I called you. I wanted a refill on my wine. I wanted to give you the jasmine and the wind chime stars.

  
I’m sorry.

—-

                You died. I was sitting on the bleachers in P.E. when Ms. Sand told me to go to the principal’s office. I was peeling the red rubber thing that said Dalton off my navy gym shorts, and chewing my fingernails on the other hand. I was staring down the slats of the bleachers to the gym floor. I wasn’t even forcing tears back down because there weren’t any, because you were dead.

                When you died, I did.

—-

                Blaine ran out of the principal’s office before they could stop him.

                Nick ran faster. He caught up with him on Magnolia under the trees with the flesh-thick white flowers. They had both climbed the fence out of the school prison; the skin on Blaine’s leg was torn, raked on metal spikes. He looked like he was going to fall onto the sidewalk. His face was red blotches over blanched skin and his eyes looked like cracked dead grass. The sweat and tears mixed on his face, so Nick couldn’t tell which was which. Blaine’s chest was heaving with running, with sobbing. A vein in his neck was pulsing like it might burst. Nick imagined trying to hold him together while rivers of pain hissed out between his fingers onto the hot tarred pavement.

                Blaine fought him at first with his ragged chipped fingernails and his fists against Nick’s chest. Nick held on until Blaine weakened, slumped against him, shaking, the way some boys did in class, jiggling their knees on their chairs, but this was his whole body paroxysms. He felt so small, like a little boy, like he could lift him in his arms. He kept saying, Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian. Wailing. Nick made what he hoped were comforting sounds, because he didn’t have a single word for him. You’re brother is dead. The person you love more than anyone. He’s dead and you’re only sixteen. Nothing is okay, it might never be okay. I love you but I know it doesn’t matter now and maybe it never will. There is nothing I can say.

                Around them it is hot stillness like everything holding its breath. No cars even passed and the usually sizzling leaves hung in silence over them. The heat and the fumes of the Valley were quiet. Nick closed his eyes and saw the ocean.

—-

                Blaine was out of school for a week. Nick went by his house a few times, but no one answered. Once his mom came to the door and said Blaine didn’t want to see anybody. Without her sunglasses, she looked a lot older. She had big hazel eyes like Blaine, but he couldn’t see Sebastian in her at all. She was manicured and wearing expensive jeans. She worked out, you could tell. Her hair was dyed blonde. There were big black-and-white photos of her and Blaine and Sebastian on the wall in the living room, Nick remembered from the time he’d gone over there. Sebastian and Blaine hated the pictures, they embarrassed them. Their mother was an interior decorator and it was her thing and they couldn’t do anything about it. It was a party, when he’d been there. The mom was out and she’d said it was okay. There were kids everywhere raiding the booze cabinet and lying around on the white couches. Blaine had on a t-shirt that laced up the front and pale yellow jeans and his hair was tousled. He smelled like vanilla and flowers and cinnamon and beer. Sebastian was drinking too much and there was lots of tossing, shiny, stretching boys around him but he didn’t seem to care about them. He and Nick went into the back bushes and shared a bong load. The house was in the canyon overlooking the valley. The pool was jewel blue and hazed in mist. Oleanders rustled around them, prickly and poisonous. Heat lay over the Valley, glazing the red, green, gold, white lights. The bong gurgled. Sebastian handed it to Nick. He looked across the lights. He said, sometimes I don’t think he’s real. Nick didn’t say anything. He knew who Sebastian was talking about. He wasn’t shocked. He understood so well and maybe that was what scared him.

                But now, standing at the front door of the house with its glittering, silver-embedded white walls, its slit windows, its little palm trees, its fake gold dome, he was waiting to see Blaine who was locked up like a princess in a fairytale and he felt like he could never find him.

                Even when Blaine came back to school, Nick felt that way. He watched him slouching around. He was wearing one of Sebastian’s sweatshirts— a green one. He looked like he lost some weight, or maybe it was just the big clothes. He didn’t have any hair gel or cologne and he was pale. Nick said hi in the hallway and he just looked at him. Nick had never seen anyone die before, but he thought that Blaine was dying.

—-

                Nick came up to Blaine when he was eating an apple out of a brown paper bag in the quad. His hair looked like he hadn’t washed it for about a week. Black squiggles fell over his eyes. He had a few red marks on his face and his fingernails were bitten. His lips were just as full as always. Nick tried to remember how Blaine looked when he smiled—the perfect flash of it, like a movie star, like he was always saying he loved you with his smile. It was hard to imagine now.

                Nick sat next to him. Who was he? Just some guy who Blaine hardly knew. Just another guy that thought he was a fox. Why was he bothering him? He needed time to be alone and get over this thing.

                But he couldn’t let him alone. He sat with him and asked him if he was okay. Blaine said, “Yeah, thanks.” Nick said, “If you want to talk about it…”

                Blaine nodded, looked down. His fingers tore at the cuticles on the other hand. He said, “Actually, I could use a ride this weekend. There’s something I gotta check out.”

                “Sure,” Nick said, trying to act cool. “Sure. No problem.”

—-

                Nick picked Blaine up at ten. He was standing outside smoking. There was a burned smell in the air, like the red oleander flowers in front of the house were on fire. Blaine didn’t say much when he got into Nick’s Mustang. He put out the cigarette and started biting his nails.

                Nick asked if he was okay. Blaine asked if he wanted the real answer or the lie. He said “Real, always real,” and Blaine said he was shitty. Nick was quiet for a long time as they drove down Laurel to the 101. Rodney on KROQ was playing some local punk bands. Nick told Blaine that he was sorry for asking him like that, making him say how he was when how else could he be. He felt even stupider after that, but Blaine thanked him. He thanked him for coming to the funeral. “It was weird,” he said, he knew Sebastian wouldn’t have wanted a funeral like that but his mom wouldn’t listen. He told her that he’d want to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over the ocean. He opened the window and put his head out and let the warm Santa Anas rush into his hair like a million wild fingers, loving him.

                Nick and Blaine pulled into the parking lot of Phases, the rundown club where Sebastian had spent a lot of his nights out. There were a few kids hanging out. The air smelled like french fries—batter and grease. The sky looked empty of planets. It felt like nothing existed except this building reverberating music you couldn’t name.

                Nick wondered why someone as cool as Sebastian came here. It was like nothing. Maybe that was why, Nick thought. You want nothing when you are trying to forget the something that is everything. He looked over at Blaine, but he couldn’t read his face.

                He got out fast and Nick followed him across the lot to the door where the biker bouncer took their money. He didn’t want a drink. Nick bought two Cokes anyway and after a while, Blaine started sipping it. He kept looking around nervously, like he was trying to find someone.

                After a while, Blaine shivered, let’s just leave, he said. Nick couldn’t help but be worried, “You sure?” he asked. “Yes, please just take me home,” Blaine nearly pleaded. “I don’t know why I thought coming here would help,” Blaine told him.

                Blaine was quiet the entire drive. When Nick pulled in front of Blaine’s house he turned to him, and said, “I’ll call you, I guess.” Blaine looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and a swift nod before quickly exiting the car.

—-

                It ended up being Blaine that called Nick. He was apologizing and crying and Nick couldn’t understand him so he asked if he should come over and Blaine said yes.

                When he got there he followed him into his room. Blaine sat on his bed, and Nick sat on his desk chair and waited. Blaine thanked him for coming and apologized again for how he was on the phone. He said something had really freaked him out and he didn’t know who to talk to about it.

                The thing that happened was a girl had come to Blaine’s door. It was one of the girls from the funeral, Justine. She said she was a friend of Sebastian’s and that she wanted to make a shrine to him and she needed materials. She wanted mementos, anything Blaine could spare. Blaine said he couldn’t do that and the girl got pissed off. She kept insisting. Blaine said, “No, please leave,” and the girl spat on the door step. She said that Blaine would regret this. She said that it’s one thing to keep someone to yourself when they are alive, but when they are dead it’s really sick.

                “I didn’t even know her,” Blaine said. “I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

                Nick watched Blaine sitting on the bed, gripping the covers like a storm was coming.

                The next day he got this note, he said. It was in the mailbox. He handed it to Nick—scrawled on a torn piece of paper, written in dark lipstick. It said: Incest is Best.

                “What the fuck?” Nick said.

                Blaine said, “She wrote it.” Then he said, “Nothing happened. It’s not what you think.”

                “I don’t think anything,” said Nick. I don’t know anything. But he wanted to do something, anything that would make it a little better.

                Blaine turned his face away, and Nick knew he was crying. He put his hand on Blaine’s shoulder. Fuck, Blaine said, rolling his up as he turned back to him, dabbing at tears with his sleeve. Here I go again.

                Nick said, “It’s okay.” Then: “Just tell me.”

                Blaine said, “I don’t believe he killed himself. I don’t believe it. Something’s not right about it. Sebastian didn’t mess around with guns.”

                Nick didn’t think that was what he was going to tell him. He’d never questioned that Sebastian killed himself. He thought Blaine was looking for why and that he already knew the answer and Nick thought he did, too, but Blaine wasn’t ready to confront it yet.

                But Nick said softly, “What do you think happened?”

                “I don’t know,” Blaine said, “I’m trying to find out.”

                “I’ll help you,” he said.

—-

 _Nothing happened._ And everything did. Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and so you believe it. Why should you question it? But then slowly seeds  are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding at the park, and they start to unfurl uncurl like little green shoots and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are called Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and think that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying. By the time this garden reaches your brain the old things are dead. They make no sense. The logic of the seeds sprouted inside of you is the only real thing.

                That was what happened to us, wasn’t it? It was like when we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.

                And the same thing happened that night.

                We were in Mr. Montgomery and Joel’s bed- room. We were drinking Mr. Montgomery and Joel’s wine out of the bottle by that time. The painting of the creature that was male and female with many arms and legs was shimmering thick rose and tourmaline and cocoa and cream shades of oil paint dancing above us. We tried on some of Ned (he was Ned by that time) and Joel’s clothes. I used some cologne that smelled dry and cool and sage. I decided to take a bath.  
               

                When I called you in my heart started to pound so hard I thought it would jump out of the water like a fish. I wondered if you would catch it in your big hands. You started to hum the Jaws music and I pretended to be scared because of that.  
               

                You weren’t wearing a shirt because you had been trying on Ned and Joel’s shirts earlier. I looked at the segments of your stomach. You took off your sweats and slid into the water. I screamed, pretending it was because you were Jaws. We were little kids in the tub rub-a-dub- dub playing a game.

                We got quiet. The garden was combing her hair and putting on her earrings. The house was full of dancing creatures, not male not female but both, two lovers in one body. The books downstairs were reciting their poetry to each other, rubbing together, whispering through the leather covers. Wine was flowing through the water pipes. You had caught my leaping heart in your hand like a fish.               

—-

                One day as they sat quietly in Blaine’s room, not really talking Blaine came to a sudden realization. Then he said, “He never came to the funeral. Why didn’t he come?”

                Nick said, “Who?” Though he thought he might have an idea.

                “I’m sorry. Our dad, I mean,” Blaine said. Their dad that they never knew.

                It turned out to be easier than either of them had ever thought, to find the dad. All they had to do was look in Blaine’s mother’s phone book.

                The mysterious missing dad lived in La Jolla, the book said. There was his name, under F. John Anderson.

                Blaine said, “Maybe I just want someone to blame, still. But he never came to the funeral. Maybe it will help.”

—-

                This is what happened when Nick Duval took me to see our father. Notice how I say our father. As in yours and mine. That was when he still was.

—-

                Blaine’s dad lived in one of the big houses on a cliff on the coast. It looked like a cluster of glass cylinders.

                They walked up the stairs among brightly colored fake-looking flowers illuminated by hidden lights. The sun was slipping further down and darkness was welling up out of the ocean.

                It took awhile for someone to come to the door. They heard a man’s voice merrily yell, “Jan! Mike! You almost missed the best…” He was a medium-sized, sun-crisped man with a mustache. He wasn’t wearing a short and he had a lot of sandy hair on his chest. He did not seem happy to see them.

                “Can I help you?” No merry voice now.

                “Are you John Anderson?” Blaine asked.

                “And you are?”

                “Blaine,” he said.

                It didn’t register.

                “Anderson?” Blaine said.

                The man’s square jaw dropped and then he started laughing. “Pretty good!” He said, “You almost had me there.” He looked past them into the dark. “Mike, you out there buddy?  Pretty good joke, man. Did he offer to buy you a beer in exchange for this?” he asked them.

                “You do have a son, don’t you?” Nick asked, surprising himself with his own voice.

                It got very quiet, just the surf whispering to the beach. The man said, “You want to tell me what this is about?” He was staring at Blaine.

                “A son named Blaine right? You haven’t seen him in a long time.”

                The man said, “I don’t know who you are, but this isn’t any of your business.” He was still staring. He said absently, as if to himself, “He’s still a kid, though.”

                “Like about sixteen, say?” Nick asked.

                “What are you trying to…?”

                A woman came up behind the man. “John? What’s going on?”

                “How’s it going?” Blaine said to the pretty young blonde woman. “I’m John’s son, Blaine Anderson. This is my friend Nick Duval. We’re visiting from L.A.”

                “Oh, what a surprise!” The woman said. “Come in!” They all went into what appeared to the living room, taking a seat.

                “It might have been nice if you’d called,” the dad said.

                “Sorry,” Blaine said, “We were just in the area.”

                “Listen, I’m sorry, this is just kind of a shock. You know your mother and I haven’t been in touch much.”

                “Yes. I know,” Blaine said. “But probably recently?

                The man hesitated, “I was sorry to hear about that.” he said.

               

                Nick saw the snarl start in Blaine’s gentle mouth. He tried to keep breathing.

               

                “That was my brother, Sebastian.” He said. “Remember him? Your son? He died. There as a funeral.”

                “Okay, settle down,” said the dad. He gave the young woman a look that said Leave, and she did.

                “I don’t expect anything from you,” Blaine said, “I never did. Neither did he. But at least you could come to his funeral! I want to know why you didn’t come to Sebastian’s funeral. I know Mom must have called you.”

                “We have our own lives, now,” he said. “It’s been fifteen years.”

                “That is such bullshit.”

                The man’s eye twitched. He stood up. “Listen, I’d have liked to talk to you rationally and explain a few things but you don’t give me much choice coming in here like this. So I’ll tell you straight: that was another life.”

                “It doesn’t matter. He was your son.”

                “Actually, he wasn’t,” the man said. “I can’t believe Jackie didn’t tell you? All this time?

                “Tell me what?”

                “She thought she couldn’t have kids.”

                “What are you talking about?”

                “She wanted a baby. Then you surprised us. I can see your timing hasn’t gotten much better.”

                “What are you talking about?” Blaine demanded. He turned to Nick, “What is he talking about?”

                “I think you better leave,” the dad said. “Blaine’s dad, but not anymore. Never Sebastian’s dad.”


End file.
